Pictarine: A powerful web app to organize social photos

With the growing number of photo sharing solutions online, it’s sometimes hard to pick one over another. Often times sharing photos means that you’ll have to upload some to Facebook, some to Flickr and still others to your Picasa account. The obvious problem, on top of the time that it takes to do this, is that your photos end up spread around everywhere.

Pictarine is a new web app that pulls in your photos from your various hosts and combines them into an organized, powerful browser where you can work with them more easily. The greater beauty? You can then take photos from all of these different places and create a virtual album (known as a Zest) to share with others. Once shared, people can add their own photos, bringing in a collaborative function like what we’ve seen from Yogile. The obvious difference, of course, is that you don’t have to start with photos on your computer, as Pictarine pulls them from your other services.

Browsing through Pictarine is a joy. Icons indicate which service you’re browsing, and photos are laid out in a clean, album-esque pattern. What’s interesting about how Pictarine works is that it also functions as a browser for photos that belong to your friends, allowing you to add them to a Zest.

Backing up photos local is a breeze, too. When you’re inside of any album, you’ll have a few options:

• Slideshow
• Invite to create Zest
• Open in service (Facebook, Flickr, etc.)
• Download

That download option lets you choose to grab only selected photos, or perhaps an entire album. Of course, if you’re trying to download from Flickr, the photos have to be available for download in order for it to work.

Right now, Pictarine is ranking as my favorite way to view and manage my online photos. I’ve not seen anything this powerful before, and the interface is a joy to use. Need a better look? Here’s an overview video so that you can see how slick it really is:

Pictarine is in a private beta right now. Of course you know that we wouldn’t tell you about something that you’d want to use without giving you access. That said, we have 200 invitations for you. Just use the code “TNW2011” to sign up and get working with Pictarine.